"Everyone
loves a Hamilton mattress..." Sludger
the aardvark has rhythm in his veins and Feldwick C Hackenbush
caterpillar is keen to get him on the ladder to
stardom. Feldwick takes Sludger
from his home in the Outback to meet the in-crowd
of Beak City, and he gives
him a hip new name lifted from ad-line on a giant
billboard. Thus Hamilton
Mattress is born.

Feldwick quickly inveigles Hamilton into the ultra-hip
Africa Club, where he
earns himself employment as a Drummer Extraordinaire
and after various
shenanigans with the rough-beaked club owner
and his snooty clientele,
our happy aardvark finds his star well and
truly in ascendance. Everyone
does indeed love a Hamilton Mattress...

This is a well-sprung film. Technically speaking,
it's a treat. The models
are fabulous, the animation extremely complex
with lots of background
action and interaction to feast upon. The voices
are splendid too, and
there's a "groovy" jitterbugging score
from Real World musicians/artistes
Spiro, Wix and Ogada. It's quirky, certainly, and
the plot's wafer
thin. But when the animation is this good,
who cares?

Hamilton
Mattress brings together three incredible British toon talents in
the
the one production: Barry Purves, Chris Moll,
and Mackinnon & Saunders.

Director Barry Purves is a veritable Toon
God, knocking on the door for admittance
into Toonhound's elite group of heroes. He
established himself as a key member
of Cosgrove Hall's production team back
in the seventies, working on the likes
of Chorlton
and the Wheelies, Grandma
Bricks, Cockleshell Bay,
and Wind inthe Willows.
Barry developed Cosgrove Hall's naturalistic animation technique
and was a central force in their award-winning
films of Cinderella and The PiedPiper of
Hamelin. In the late eighties he joined up with Aardman Animation
where he brought us a condensed version of
Shakespeare in his film "Next",
and almost brought home an Academy Award for
the Oscar-nominated short
"Screenplay". "Rigoletto" and
"Achilles" followed. His work on the aborted
stop-motion Martian animation for Tim Burton's
"Mars Attacks" has been
well-documented and universally praised. In
1997 he returned to Cosgrove
Hall to direct and animate on series including
Brambly Hedge, "Noddy",Lavender
Castle and "The Animal Shelf". Somewhere in the
middle he
squeezed out another laudedfilm titled after, and
about "Gilbert & Sullivan"..

Producer Chris Moll, meanwhile, can highlight
all three of Nick Park/Aardman's
Wallace & Gromit movies on his producer's
CV. A Grand Day Out, "The
Wrong
Trousers" and A
Close Shave were instant animated classics, weren't they?

As for Mackinnon & Saunders, well, this
little firm was set up in 1992. They
specialize in the making of animation puppets
and models. And they're darned
good at it. They produced the amazing Martian
figures for that aborted "Mars
Attacks" animation as well as beautiful
puppets for Cosgrove Hall's revamp of
"Noddy", Oakie Doke,
Brambly Hedge, HIT Entertainment's
Bob the Builder
and more recently, those helpful Koala
Brothers. They also conmstructed
the remarkablr models featured in "The
Corpse Bride".

As for Hamilton. He came. He drummed. And
a sequel is still supposedly
in the pipeline....

Mackinnon
& Saunders
The puppet makers have an official
site, but there's only a title page here
right now, pending a fully-fledged
launch...Entertainment
Rights
And a third official site now,
for Hamilton's licensing firm. Mr Mattress
is joined by other characters
in their roster like Basil Brush and Merlin
The Magic Puppy...